Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users — Before Lucid 360
darthcamaro writes "It's always a challenge to try and figure out how many users a particular Linux distro has — but Canonical is now providing a new figure for Ubuntu that is 50 percent more than what they were claiming just 18 months ago. 'We have no phone home or registration process, so it's always a guesstimate. But based on the same methodology that we came up with for the 2008 number, our present belief is that it's somewhere north of 12 million users at the moment,' Chris Kenyon, vice president for OEM at Canonical, told InternetNews.com. Just in case you were wondering, Fedora still claims more — actually almost double, at 24 million."
Some fairly realistic figures (Score:2, Informative)
Number of computer users worldwide = 1.2 billion (taken from various estimates)
Linux market share = 1.12% [wikipedia.org] (composite of various sources)
Ubuntu market share = 50% of Linux (source = same Wikipedia article)
This gives us 1.2 billion * 0.0112 * 0.5 = 7 million Ubuntu users worldwide.
Re:Sadly (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sadly (Score:3, Informative)
Every heard of sudo -i ?
Re:NTP-servers... (Score:5, Informative)
It does, at least in Debian.
Re:NTP-servers... (Score:2, Informative)
I'm almost certain that it defaults to "no", you have to click the "yes" button to participate.
This [ubuntu.com] page says that the package is already installed on the system, but is disabled by default:
This means that all you need to do is enable it.
Re:Sadly (Score:1, Informative)
Or also sudo -s ('s' for shell). Lots of ways to not have to enter a shell's actual name. I liked Ubuntu's use of sudo so much, I setup my FreeBSD systems the same way.
These numbers are based on desktop usage mostly (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fedora *had* 24 million users (Score:2, Informative)
+1 to dependency hell, largely because of the copyright issues over media playback and the completely broken way that Fedora tried to get around it.
And not just dependency hell, but that "SELinux" stuff that secures your OS by the simple act of not allowing anything at all to run, ever.
Ubuntu netbook remix is a winner.
Re:Fedora *had* 24 million users (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, Fedora claims 24 million *active* users between Fedora 7 and Fedora 12 -- a timeframe well after you would have run into "dependency hell" issues.
We actually document our methodology, too. Right here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
So your usage of the past tense is incorrect.
You want real statistics ... (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the hit count for operating system from Wikimedia:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
Linux has a 1.65% market share and of that share Ubuntu has 0.71%. Ubuntu has approximately 43% market share among Linux users, which by a very large margin makes it the most popular distro.
Re:Sadly (Score:5, Informative)
Don't know if you've noticed, but if you type sudo su - and hit enter, you now have superuser access.
Actually, no. You can escalate your privileges to the superuser only if your account is configured to allow for that. You can easily configure every account on the machine to not be escalatable and just use one account for admin tasks. Secondly, you have to type in your password so, no, you don't just "hit enter".
Re:Sadly (Score:3, Informative)
Disabling the root password means a cracker needs to take the additional step of identifying a valid user account to target.
Disabling the root password means now they only need to hijack a normal local user account, not root. You're effectively running as root, with all the security implications.
Re:Some guesstimate? (Score:1, Informative)
I suppose that if I were even a half serious gamer, and I needed to get my machine's ultimate output in FPS and DirectX crap, I would find VM's to be inadequate.
Well, I'm not even a half serious gamer - but I still need to dual-boot a Windows system to use the 3D card. Not just to get better FPS, but to run games at all. Wine works much better for gaming than any VM I've tried, and there's still a lot that Wine can't run.
Re:Sadly (Score:1, Informative)
Ubuntu always uses the same UID for the first main user account. So instead of trying to get the password for UID=0, you're trying to get the password for UID=1000.